Truth
by Spot and Punk
Summary: In the wake of Cuddy's bombshell, House sets out on a road well travelled... House doesn't fight too hard against the inevitable.


**Truth**

If he'd stopped to think about it for a minute, it was kind of scary how fast he had fallen back into familiar habits and comfortable routine. The last two years had just dropped away and he should have thought about how easy that had been, but he didn't.

What had finally occurred to him was the very nature of his battle against the leg. He had thought for so many years that his pain was much _much_ worse than it was. He had been deceived by it, been weak in the face of the fear of it and had happily continued to deceive himself. He couldn't think too deeply about how that made him just as much a part of his own downfall as anyone else he cared to blame at any given moment; Stacy, Wilson, Amber, Kutner, Cuddy… the names all blended into the only one that really counted eventually: his own.

He needed a distraction, Cuddy had provided that very nicely for the last few months. A distraction along with some super strength ibuprofen, SSRIs and life was tolerable, manageable. The Vicodin then, if truth be told, was about numbing emotional pain, and he should probably admit that now. All his life it seemed to him, he had been looking for the emptiness that the little white pills delivered so well, for one reason and another. It hadn't been the pain in his leg that had driven him to give in, it had been the other kind of pain, the one he didn't want to admit to, the one that had him sitting on the bathroom floor, pitiable and miserable.

That left him an even more pathetic addict, one who couldn't honestly use the chronic pain excuse any longer. The fear brought on by the agony of his early recovery after the infarction had turned him into an addict. Fear had ramped that same pain up, become his constant companion for the last 15 years, even formed new neuron pathways in his brain - he had convinced himself that easily.

House hauled himself up using the edge of the bath as a lever and thought back to the time he had done with Nolan. He had surrendered to the Mayfield thing, done the rehab and the therapy and all the way through it, he'd had the chronic pain to fall back on, to excuse the depths to which he'd sunk. Now, he had to face up to the essential nature of his problems, he was no better an addict than anyone else. No more righteous, no more hard done by. He hated Stacy even more for what she had done, then in the very same second, realised that he really couldn't blame her any longer either.

He was a broken man once again, only this time, he wasn't sure there were any pieces big enough to reassemble.

House shook a pair of pills into the palm of his hand studying them as though they would reveal some sort of vision of the future, as if he couldn't already see how this was all going to play out. He swallowed them down easily, just as he had done in the past, and waited for the peace of the numb emptiness and the rush they would bring.

When he had finished buttoning his shirt, he thought for a second about pulling out a jacket from his closet. Deciding he wouldn't need it, he stashed the bottle of pills deep into the pocket of his jeans and strode toward the door of the apartment. Grabbing his keys from the table under the mirror he didn't stop to check its reflection, fearful of some sort of conscience shining back at him.

All the logic he claimed to live by didn't matter in the face of what he knew would become routine over the coming nights and days. All the pent up good behaviour of his time since Mayfair had been bottled up and needed to be expunged, spill over the top and ooze out leaving a messy trail in its wake. He needed to let it all go, blow it clear, only then would there be any hope to be had.

That was it then, it all needed to happen despite him. Whatever was coming, he knew wouldn't be pretty but he felt some sort of power from the force of it, the tsunami he was about to unleash.

He limped out of his building toward the car he knew he would abandon in some dubious part of town later and lifted his bad leg into position. He waited for a minute almost thinking about trying to convince himself not to go any further down this particular road then turned the key in the ignition. The not quite numb enough part of him scared by the surety of what was coming watched detached as he pulled out into the road and waited patiently at a stop light. There would be no turning back, just as time knew to move on since the beginning as Stevie Wonder once said, so House would hit one bar after another and chase after the kind of risky behaviour he had fought so hard against two years ago. Whatever would be, would be after all.


End file.
